Often times when we make maps it is based on our subjective interpretation of what is aesthetically pleasing. I would like if people posted examples of beautiful maps, displaying any phenomena in any manner.

Below I have posted one of my favorite maps. This is an example of a value-by-alpha map recently asked about on the forum, and the picture is taken from the GeoVista website (which has a ton of cool maps and tools to make them.)

While I did not stipulate this when I originally asked the question, I think it would be best for the cultivation of knowledge if people would elaborate on why the particular maps they cite are beautiful. I would appreciate any new responses to include this, and if the other authors are still around to update their examples for why they think the maps they mentioned are beautiful.

And I will start with my example, the reason I believe I think the cited value-by-alpha map is beautiful is that it creates a very simple, but obvious and striking visual hierarchy with which to interpret the standardized mortality ratio's. This is in particular useful combined with the very "noisy" standardized mortality ratio's, and the typically very noisy clusters of abnormally high rates produced by the SatScan clustering technique. One can even clearly see very small clusters around Chicago and Philadelphia.

I also appreciate other supplemental elements of the map that make it easy of the eyes. Such as the black background, the heavier white outline for around the states and the white outline for the states (that is blended the same as the attribute values). Maps with many polygons can particularly be distracting if one does not take care when plotting the polygon outlines.

Also the legend is particularly well created, and effectively demonstrates the concept (although it certainly isn't a typical legend, so took some original creative thought).

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Whats your thoughts on having a repeat question but with 'badly designed' in mind. - I have seen plenty of old local government web mapping sites that are very painful to understand (even as a GIS professional) I think it would be good to show examples of bad design, with detailed justification, but at the same time, is it ok to name & shame people?
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SimonOct 31 '10 at 1:18

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@Simon, I think suggestions of badly designed maps could be just as informative. If its public I have no problem shaming anyone, and it would have informational value to our community. Like you said the poster should add reasoning as to why it is poor.
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Andy WOct 31 '10 at 1:58

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@Simon, don't forget about cartotalk.com which has a forum dedicated to people posting maps for people to critique.
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mkennedyDec 8 '10 at 23:30

Yes I would like examples of any type of map, static/dynamic, small multiples, time varying, whatever. That map is pretty cool, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I wouldn't disagree that conveying a message in the most simplest of manners can make something more beautiful.
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Andy WOct 30 '10 at 23:22

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I disagree, I think usability is a kind of beauty, it's like the forth road bridge, its beauty isn't aesthetic its in its functionality.
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TrevesyNov 6 '10 at 19:01

From the hip my answer would be Stephen Walter's 'The island': witty, irreverent, slightly subversive he has hand drawn a map of London representing it as an island (poking fun at Londoners' London centric view of the world).

This is the one that started it all for me. At age ~10 I first read R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island.
The map somehow encapsulates the mystery, adventure, search and discovery of a great story. Not only that, but Pirates! Har.

I originally posted this in another thread on visualizing network flows. Anyone interested in representing flows should check out the couple of threads on this site tagged with network.

As to the reasoning why I believe these maps are beautiful, flow maps can easily become very complicated. The mess of in-flows and out-flows tend to be difficult to visualize and summarize effectively (see this other answer of mine where I go into greater detail about how visualizing flow lines is typically done).

These two flow maps exemplify effectively visualizing such flow information in a concise manner. The PLoS article is a very nice example of utilizing a 3d perspective (which I have never been able to make anything in 3d that looks very nice!).

Sometimes knowing what goes into the creation of some work also gives you a greater appreciation for it. Reading the blog post about the creation of the facebook map is a wonderful exposition of the types of difficult data management skills necessary to handle, and make sense of, such a massive set of data.

Although each of the maps have their critics, the PLoS article has been critisized as being trivial by Andrew Gelman, and Laurent in the comments posted a series of blog posts by Th. Joliveau, I believe each is still a beautiful (and very effective) map visualization of flows between two locations.

The "facebook friendship" is perhaps artistically beautiful, but it's a caricature of cartography. The author has not the first idea of how to represent data.
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Laurent JégouDec 26 '11 at 7:48

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@LaurentJégou, that seems unduly harsh. Do you have more specific critiques, or better examples of "how to represent the data"?
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Andy WDec 28 '11 at 20:26

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Th. Joliveau, a professor of cartography, wrote a whole serie of posts on his blog about this "map" : mondegeonumerique.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/… My main complaint about it, besides the absence of projection, is that the representation is absolutely not objective, the "main links" on the maps are not the main "friendship" relations.
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Laurent JégouDec 29 '11 at 9:47

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@LaurentJégou, thank you for those links, it is a set of very well written posts. It still is IMO unwarranted to say it is a "caricature of cartography" or that "The author has not the first idea how to represent the data". While some of the maps representation were not "objective" (when is a map's symbology entirely objective?) I believe it is a very well constructed example of demonstrating relationships. Aggregations are still sums of their parts, and I'll hold my skepticism that much better could be done when I see it.
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Andy WJan 2 '12 at 16:33

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@LaurentJégou, I disagree. The links are representative of facebook relationships between two places (aggregation is a necessary evil to reduce/manage the information in this instance). I agree with some of Joliveau's critiques about symbology, and how the relationships between places are confounded to a certain extent by facebook participation. Also the jab saying it is designed to promote facebook is misplaced (as well as the vague reference to Monmonier's book). How does facebook profit off of this map anymore than the republished ones on Joliveau's blog?
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Andy WJan 3 '12 at 13:12

This is one of the maps from ER Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. What I like best here are the vertical labels for mountain peaks and places. It is a perfect fit for Japans' tategaki (columns going from top to bottom) writing direction.

I wonder if this map is nice largely because it's fictional? If it was real, it'd be missing a lot of detail, which some people might consider important (smaller towns, roads, turns in roads, etc.). If the style was applied to a real world, it might begin to look very crowded.
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naught101Feb 26 '13 at 0:10

The shadings are indicating the bathymetry. The points indicate areas where the company has data. I'm not sure about the orange overlay - perhaps just for visual appeal. The target users do not need any more info about the map, they are only interested in the highlighted points and already understand what they mean. I just haven't seen a representation of bathymetry in this way before and thought it looked intersting.
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IanMay 24 '12 at 1:38

I agree the visualization is impressive, but I have had to downvote. It is a really awful presentation for flow data. See one of my other answers for a wider discussion of how people present flow data in IMO a much more enlightening manner.
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Andy WAug 7 '12 at 23:40